Human Rights Issues to Test Mexican President’s Mettle

Whether he looks back to massacres and torture cases or forward to ending such abuses, President-elect Vicente Fox is surrounded by vexing human rights challenges. How he handles them could determine whether he succeeds in turning Mexico into a lawful nation.

Fox has promised to create a truth commission to investigate high-profile rights abuses. But he told reporters recently: “We are not going to lose ourselves in the past. We want to look to the future and achieve unity among all Mexicans.”

Still, the past refuses to go away.

Rosario Ibarra, for one, remembers the details of the first unsolved disappearance on her activist group’s books: Teacher Epifanio Aviles Rojas was kidnapped by the army May 18, 1969, in the poor state of Guerrero. Over the years, the list of such forced disappearances has grown to 448. They include Ibarra’s own son, Jesus, an alleged guerrilla who was abducted in April 1975 and never seen again.

Ibarra, 73, has fought for 25 years to clarify these cases. “We are tired of being kicked from one office to another like a football,” she said. “We are fed up with being tricked. It is psychological torture.”

The legacy of the disappeared is just one of many emotional human rights issues facing Fox, the first opposition presidential candidate to defeat Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, since the party was created in 1929. Other issues range from the 1968 killing of an estimated 300 students by soldiers in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square to the 1997 slaying of 45 unarmed peasants by a pro-government paramilitary squad in the southernmost state of Chiapas.

“We are a country full of wounds--self-inflicted wounds and wounds inflicted by the regime,” said veteran human rights activist and political scientist Sergio Aguayo. “The leaders of the transition now face the challenge of deciding how far they want to go. There is a challenge of expectations. People are expecting a lot.”

The pressures on Fox go far beyond matters of the past. Future issues range from addressing the dormant Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas to ensuring that citizens’ rights are respected by police and the courts and that individuals guilty of abusing those rights are held accountable. Fox will be pressed to open up to international scrutiny what has long been an isolation-prone country.

To respond to all these issues, Fox has drawn together a diverse team of activists and government critics to craft a human rights agenda. And this week, he gave several of them top positions in his administration.

Among them is Mariclaire Acosta, who has spent 26 years as a national human rights campaigner. She has organized consultations with about 800 civic groups to develop civil rights plans slated to be consolidated into legislative proposals in the first six months of Fox’s presidency.

If she has her way, the ferment behind the defeat of the PRI will translate into new forms of civic action that “monitor the use and abuse of power.”

On Monday, Fox named Acosta special ambassador for human rights and democracy. In accepting the post, she pledged to try to close “the abyss between official rhetoric on human rights and the sad reality.”

Acosta is targeting two infamous practices: torture to extract confessions and delays of a year or two before jailed suspects get a chance to appear at a probable-cause hearing.

“The great majority of human rights violations occur within the judicial system, which is designed not to uphold the law but to maintain control,” she said. “The judicial system redesign has to be done with civic participation.”

Acosta is optimistic because she believes the foundation of Fox’s victory was growing grass-roots rejection of civil rights violations. She argues that any future government will be less able to abuse people’s rights.

But as Fox takes on Mexico’s culture of impunity, he will have to make hard decisions about how aggressive he can afford to be with vested interests in the military, the police and the security services, not to mention powerful criminal organizations.

“All of this is plagued with dangers--to different degrees--but all of it is very dangerous,” said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, another leftist activist turned Fox advisor, who was appointed this week as head of the new National Security Council. “In Mexico, the question of corruption is at least as critical as human rights because they are all tied together: impunity, corruption and human rights.”

The Mexican military has long enjoyed relative independence in return for its loyalty to the PRI and could be particularly resistant to reform.

In recent years, the military role has grown steadily from one of defending the borders to include the much more complex tasks of combating drug traffickers and subduing domestic guerrillas. Fox will need to decide whether the military keeps those tasks at all.

On Monday, Fox appointed as defense secretary army Gen. Ricardo Vega, described as an intellectual who will opt for greater openness in the military. Fox also named tough-minded military chief prosecutor Rafael Macedo de la Concha as attorney general, which worried some rights activists who believe military and civilian justice shouldn’t be mixed.

The military’s growing role in domestic security issues and its increased independence have led to widespread abuses, activists say. Brig. Gen. Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, arrested in August on charges of drug trafficking, also is accused by human rights groups of involvement in hundreds of disappearances while he was in charge of anti-insurgency operations in violence-torn Guerrero. In addition, the groups accuse him of involvement in the massacre of 17 peasants at Aguas Blancas in Guerrero in June 1995.

Guerrero, an impoverished mountainous state surrounding the resort of Acapulco, has been a breeding ground for leftist rebels since the mid-1970s. The other military quagmire is in Chiapas, which grabbed world attention when Zapatista rebels staged a brief uprising there in 1994. That conflict is now deadlocked, but sporadic violence continues to claim lives, and the underlying demands for greater Indian rights remain unmet.

Fox, who once pledged to end the Chiapas conflict “in 15 minutes,” now must confront the realities of a situation involving disputes over religious, indigenous and property rights.

Fox said this month that he will send to Congress on Friday--his first day in office--a framework for a peace settlement with the Zapatistas, based on preliminary accords reached in 1996 but shelved by President Ernesto Zedillo. He said his initiative will include reductions in troop levels in Chiapas as a confidence-building measure.

Ibarra said Fox’s effectiveness on human rights will determine the effectiveness of his presidency.

“There have been hundreds of disappearances, hundreds of murders and illegal detentions,” she said. “Fox has all this weight of the past on him, and if he doesn’t carry out his promises, he will have a double weight. He will become an accomplice if he doesn’t stop these abuses from continuing to happen.”

Fox’s transition team has given no clear indication yet of how the promised Transparency Commission, similar to truth commissions in Argentina, Chile and South Africa, would operate.

It is unclear what powers of subpoena the commission would have or whether the goal would be to learn the truth or punish past offenders.

Activist Aguayo said that, as a first step, Fox should open the records of the presidency and government ministries. “It would be a symbolic act for the commission members to be the first ones to enter the archives. It is an act of healing that begins with knowledge.”

But Aguayo cautioned: “Historical truth is possible. Justice is not always possible.”

In the international rights arena, Fox is expected to shed the PRI’s defensiveness regarding foreign criticism.

Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have been increasingly critical of Mexico, and visas for human rights observers have been correspondingly harder to come by.

Amnesty International said in a report in March 1999 that over the previous five years it had detected a “serious deterioration in the human rights situation in Mexico. Many of the causes of human rights violations are systemic and occur nationwide, but the crisis is particularly acute in the southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, where armed opposition groups are present.”

The report cited widespread torture, extrajudicial executions, disappearances and arbitrary detentions, and added, “The legal mechanisms designed to protect victims of violations are simply ignored.”

After an upsurge in the early and mid-1990s, reports of torture have declined. The Zedillo administration insists that it has improved official respect for civil rights.

The globalization of human rights could thrust Fox into an important decision early in his presidency. His government could order the extradition to Spain of Ricardo Miguel Cavallo, a former Argentine naval officer accused of taking part in torture and killings during Argentina’s “dirty war” against leftists in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Two more immediate challenges facing Fox involve jailed Mexican activists.

Relatives of dissident army Gen. Jose Francisco Gallardo, who was imprisoned in 1993 on what critics say were trumped-up charges, have said they will appeal to Fox for his release. He was convicted of corruption, but his family says his real offense was to call for an ombudsman in the military.

The other case involves peasant ecologists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, who were convicted of weapons charges in Guerrero. Mexican and international environmental groups say the two were jailed because they accused powerful interests in the state of causing deforestation through excessive logging.

Aguilar Zinser cautioned that Fox cannot intervene improperly in the judicial arena to resolve such cases. “If you have to break the law in order to stand by the rule of law, then it’s an endless process,” he said.

Fox needs to act quickly on several languishing reform proposals concerning matters such as speeding up trials and establishing clear rules for early release from prison, said Edgar Cortes, head of the Miguel Agustin Pro Human Rights Center in Mexico City.

“I would say that in recent years, we have managed a good diagnosis of the problems and their causes. Unfortunately, we have advanced very little in the cures,” he said. “The great task is this: to start to apply remedies to many of these issues.”

*

THURSDAY: To build strong democratic institutions, Fox must take on graft-riddled agencies such as the police.

*

Part 1 of the “Remaking Mexico” series is available on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/mexico